The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
themselves to work for years in return for nothing but food and a place to sleep, and sometimes the training that might allow them, with luck, to set up eventually in a skilled craft.
Hunger and illness took an enormous toll. For those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the consequences were devastating. Many resorted to petty theft in an attempt to keep body and soul together, to feed their children, simply to survive. Women had the additional option of prostitution, and many took it. Others wandered, hoping for work, and sometimes getting a little, as they went from town to town. But, cutting off virtually the last option, the Poor Laws of the 1500s made wandering without visible support illegal. It was called vagrancy, and, like theft, meant you risked joining those in the already overflowing prisons. Some chose “voluntary” exile instead. Poverty made risking Virginia, selling yourself for (usually) seven years, look like a reasonable choice.45 Few chose to go because they were ambitious and hopeful; they went in hope of staying alive—an ironic hope, given the extraordinary death rate in Jamestown. By 1624, all but 1,200 of the 6,700 colonists sent to Virginia were dead.46 Perhaps they would have chosen differently had they been better informed, but staying in England was hardly a healthy option either. Yet even the likelihood of starvation in England did not produce enough willing volunteers to satisfy Virginia planters’ desire for labor; death in Virginia was too likely.47
Meanwhile, as more and more people were driven into poverty, the charity burden on parish coffers became heavier and heavier. English politicians, some of the Virginia Company investors, and some of the Jamestown gentry, began to suggest that they could relieve England’s problems—rising crime, vagrancy, prostitution—by sending the glut of the dispossessed, the poor, and the unemployed to the colonies. Hence, involuntary workers joined the so-called voluntary transfer of England’s dispossessed to the colonies.48 The gentry who supported this proposal insisted the dispossessed would work off their punishment and become useful, docile, and eventually free and productive members of an orderly society. Not everyone was in favor of this solution. Some Jamestown leaders protested that more “scum” was not what they needed—they had enough trouble controlling the ones they already had. To be sure, in the early days they had at least as much trouble controlling the “swaggering great” as the laborers; all pretty much refused to work for the good of the Virginia Company investors in England.49 But in any case, the proposal took hold.
Force would be needed, given that not enough people were “volunteering” to go. So laws and policies were established to provide it, including the criminalization of vagrancy, the punishment of Scots and Irish “traitors,” and the elevation of petty crimes to hanging offenses—eventually there were 300 crimes carrying a death penalty. Since the king had no authority to sentence people to transportation, it was offered as a “merciful” option. The poor were swept up on vagrancy charges; prisons were emptied of able-bodied inmates. The poor thus joined the criminal—although as historian Peter Linebaugh makes clear, that was often a meaningless distinction since it was impossible for so many to survive legally.50 The entire way of life of the dispossessed—the poor, the jobless, the homeless—had been made illegal.
Killing two birds with one stone, England both unloaded its increasingly restive poor and provided Jamestown planters with dispossessed laborers—assuming they didn’t die.51 Children were among the first to go under this system. Orphans were indentured, transferred from overcrowded orphanages and poorhouses to ships’ captains who sold their indentures in the colonies, a whole shipload in 1619, and some 1,400 to 1,500 in 1627 alone. It is very unlikely that X Radford would have been one of them—only 12 of the first 300 children lived more than three years, and if I consider my cousin’s family mythology true for the sake of this chapter, then he obviously lived long enough to reproduce.52 More likely, his master brought him as a servant; even more likely, he was one of the poor on an investor’s estate, sent as a Virginia Company laborer, with or without his consent. Or he might have been accused of vagrancy or theft. Or he might have been kidnapped. Once the head-right system was established in 1618, bringing indentured servants to the colonies became a source of wealth. “Headright” meant that whoever paid the shipping fee for a servant could claim 50 acres from the Virginia Company and, after 1624, from the Crown. Kidnapping quickly became profitable, and joined the legalized methods of providing more workers.
Even if X were one of those who went voluntarily, the choice to go would have reflected his assessment of the conditions under which he was living. For younger sons of the middling gentry, the decision was often based on a lack of financial opportunities: primogeniture laws meant that eldest sons inherited their father’s entire estate, leaving younger sons to fend for themselves. For them the propaganda about Virginia and the wealth to be found there might well have been attractive. (Few women made that choice, and in the beginning few women were sent involuntarily.) Absconding to Virginia was also a way for embroiled younger gentry to escape debt or avoid the clutches of the law. But if X had been one of these, he would have been listed on one of the ship rosters of those early years, and far less likely to be among the many nameless and voiceless in the annals of Jamestown history.
CONDITIONS IN JAMESTOWN WOULD certainly not have relieved X Radford.53 I am going to make an assumption here about X and the others who so infuriated Jamestown leaders and investors by their refusal to work. Their refusal was so intense that had not John Smith and his successors instituted martial law and adopted the spectacular punishments for minor infractions that were already common in England (and among the Powhatan), the colony might have disappeared. My assumption is that these refusers were not stupid or irrational people, nor particularly greedy or lazy, or as unaccustomed to hard work as they are often described. After all, even soft-handed gentry are quite capable of changing their ways and developing calluses if that is obviously the only way to stay alive. Most accounts of Jamestown are written with an underlying assumption that the right thing (for the English at the time) was to make a success of Jamestown—that such success would best serve the interests of English people sent to work in the colony. With this assumption, their refusal to work appears misguided at best, and the leaders appear to have been right, even heroic, in their draconian efforts to force people to work to save themselves. I tend to be suspicious of accounts that assume that leaders who kill, jail, and maim are acting for the good of “the people” rather than for the good of an elite who thereby gain a relatively docile population who permit the orderly extraction of wealth from their labor. And I tend also to be suspicious of accounts that portray those from whom wealth is being extracted as irrational when they don’t cooperate.
As I have shown, forcing people into docility requires control of punishment, which requires a monopoly on the use of force. Ultimately, it requires the punishing institutions that only a state has the power to provide. The English at Jamestown were backed by a state, but it was a relatively weak one, and it certainly was a distant one. The assumption that leaders designated by elites would know what was best for the good of all disappeared. Indeed, the whole hierarchy of duty to one’s superiors fell apart without the class and gender structures that had locked people into obedience in England. To me it seems obvious that, without the accustomed channels to obedience, leaders in Virginia would have looked quite different to many of the laborers and even to some of the gentry. And since access to land was denied in the colony, the incentive of hope for a better future was cut off. I don’t think it would have been at all evident to X and many others that their best interests lay with a successful Jamestown colony and happy investors in England. Especially when they saw what looked to them like paradise—orderly Powhatan fields and villages, and people who apparently loved and honored their leaders, leaders who returned that honor with unparalleled (in English experience) generosity. That the Powhatan were moving toward the centralized control of punishing that characterizes a state would not have been immediately evident, or perhaps even recognized as relevant.
Either Jamestown leaders had to reconstruct state power or fail in their duty to organize the production of wealth for the elites. And without the social structures that normally would legitimize state power, they had nothing to resort to but the raw use of force to punish, and punish they did—publicly, painfully, and lengthily. They also tried to harness the authority that had been created out of ritual and spirituality in England as religion, state, and stratification had developed hand in hand.54 Attending church services twice